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Inanimate Alice – Teaching Featured

The class I taught a couple of weeks ago on Digital Fiction in which I used Inanimate Alice as a focus text is now featured on the Inanimate Alice iTeach blog! After a few exchanges on twitter and email, Jess Lacetti (who developed the fantastic pedagogy pack that accompanies Inanimate Alice) published this piece about my class. Included is a quote from me about why I selected Inanimate Alice as my focus exemplar:

Inanimate Alice provides a great starting point for pointing out to teachers an exemplary form of Digital Fiction. It progressively uses more complex features related to what I’ve termed (Thomas, 2005) as the affordances of digital fiction: multimodality, multiliteracies, hypertext, interactivity, spatiality, and identity. For English teachers who are not adept with technology it provides a wonderful introduction to new forms of narrative, yet the developing sophistication makes it richly layered with features that can be discussed, debated, analysed and interpreted by e-literature theorists. Pragmatically, it is something that every single teacher I work with can leave my workshop and go back and use it in some way in their classrooms. It has connected with all of my students at some level, whether they teach year 2 or year 12. It is very difficult to find such rich examples that are suitable for use in the classroom context and that have a universal appeal. More recently, the encouragement for teachers and their students to remix or mashup the story allows for a much higher level of participation within and around the narrative of Alice’s journey, and its clear that the authors are genuinely pushing boundaries and shaping new narrative possibilities – true artists of new media authoring.